n continent and subsisting on the adjectives
which Ralph was to trap for his epic. On this occasion, however, his
wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their
carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the Fontebranda gate. He had
seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from
the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a
knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted--that she was sick to
death of being alone with him.

He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers
on the steep above them. After all there was nothing sudden in his
discovery. For weeks it had hung on the edge of consciousness, but
he had turned from it with the heart's instinctive clinging to the
unrealities by which it lives. Even now a hundred qualifying reasons
rushed to his aid. They told him it was not of himself that Undine had
wearied, but only of their present way of life. He had said a moment
before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place
the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in
such a life as she was leading before their marriage? And he had to
acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote Italian
hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and
dinners would have been to him. An imagination like his, peopled with
such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the
long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of
the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered. Her mind
was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in
which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic
as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant
hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this,
and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.
The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give
him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her
pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous.

Meanwhile he had no desire to sacrifice her wishes to his, and it
distressed him that he dared not confess his real reason for avoiding
the Engadine. The truth was that their funds were shrinking faster than
he had expected. Mr. Spragg, after bluntly opposing their hastened
marriage on the ground that